Explanation behind Sprinter calamity doesn’t pass smell test

Outwardly it appears as though the North County Transit District and its leadership team feel the removal of one maintenance chief will be enough to keep folks from asking questions about the latest Sprinter calamity. The district, following the lead of County Supervisor – and Board Chair – Bill Horn and Executive Director Matt Tucker, appears to be applying its own version of “Keep Calm and Carry On” to a situation that to many outside observers seems to be a bit more dire.

After Sprinter service was abruptly and embarrassingly shut down systemwide on the very day NCTD had planned a celebration of the $477 million rail line’s first five years in operation, fingers pointed in one direction – away from top managers.

Call me crazy, but $50 million worth of rolling stock sitting idle for months, plus an as-yet-unrevealed expenditure to replace the lost service to the claimed 10,000 riders the system serves, merits considerably more angst than we see from either Horn or his board. If I were Tucker, I’d be concerned about the warmth of my chair.

That NCTD tries to pass this off as an unfortunate event that was unforeseen and unavoidable due to their abundance of caution frankly doesn’t pass the smell test.

According to the district’s chief of safety, Tom Tulley, the entire system had to be shut down because they had no spare parts on hand. The reason they had no spare parts on hand was because the rotors they were using had a test life of 600,000 miles and the trains only had traveled 300,000 miles.

That might sound reasonable except for the fact that he also mentions they substituted a different brake pad because the original ones in use made a “high-pitched squeal.” No one apparently considered that the change in the pad might make a difference in the wear of the rotor.

Another problem stems from the train’s European manufacture. It so happens there are no U.S. suppliers certified to manufacture the parts in question.

Even lacking the foreknowledge of possible differences in wear patterns, how is it possible – knowing it could take weeks, months even, to obtain these critical parts – that you wouldn’t have some on hand? Particularly since we are talking about an agency that is supposedly highly regulated in the area of safety and is itself operating out of a sense of an abundance of caution,

One possible answer, ironically, is an attempt to save money by only stocking necessary parts for maintenance using the just-in-time practices adopted by many businesses over recent years. This is a proven strategy, but you have to know what parts are necessary.

It seems logical to me that you would, at the very least, have a contingency plan to cover the unforeseen event that might occur. I can’t think of this being anything less than a textbook unforeseen event, at least given the explanation NCTD spokespersons have seen fit to make public to date.

The one silver lining in this is at the same time something that should make us stop and think about the NCTD’s whole costly experiment with fixed-rail public transit. It turns out the operating cost for the non-rail replacement modes used to schlep those displaced Sprinter riders is roughly half that of the rail line.